Andrei Linde and the Beauty of Science

On Monday, a team of scientists announced that the BICEP2 telescope, at the South Pole, had detected gravitational waves that could be traced to a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, lending evidence to a theory about the universe’s expansion called Inflation. As Lawrence Krauss explained in a post yesterday, this discovery could “allow us to peer back to the very beginning of time—a million billion billion billion billion billion times closer to the Big Bang than any previous direct observation.”

It’s an exciting discovery, even to those of us who didn’t know before this week that gravity came in waves. Stanford University has released a video that captures both the giddy joy and the arcane wonkiness that have accompanied the news. It shows the BICEP2 researcher Chao-Lin Kuo paying a surprise visit to report the findings to Andrei Linde, a physics professor at Stanford University who was a pioneer of Inflation theory in the nineteen-eighties.

The beginning of the video plays out like an episode of “Extreme Makeover: Theoretical Physics Edition.” Professor Kuo approaches Linde’s house, in a quiet California suburb. “He has no idea that I’m coming,” he tells the camera. Linde and his wife answer the door together. “I have a surprise for you,” Kuo tells them. Then he says the magic words: “It’s five sigma at point two.”

Linde’s wife, Renata Kallosh, who is also a physics professor at Stanford, seems to understand what’s happening first. She appears to go weak and wobbly-kneed, and steps forward to embrace Kao as though it’s the only thing that will keep her standing.

Now it’s Linde who seems like he might fall over. He slumps against the doorframe, then smiles slightly and asks, one more time, “Can you repeat it again?” Kuo can’t even finish his sentence before Linde gives a final burst of disbelief: “Point two?”

Inside the house, the scientists pop open a bottle of champagne. Linde says that he had no idea who would be at the door. His wife thought it must be a delivery and asked if he’d ordered anything. “Yeah,” he says now, “I ordered it thirty years ago. Finally it arrived.”

Any scientific breakthrough related to the origin of the universe is bound to set off a firestorm of discussion about creation, evolution, the tensions between faith and science, and the relationship between belief and proof. Linde’s final comments in this video provide a welcome pause in that debate. “This is a moment of understanding of nature of such a magnitude that it just overwhelms,” he says in a thick Russian accent. “Let us hope it is not a trick. I always live with this feeling. What if I am tricked? What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful? What if…” He can’t finish his thought.

It’s rare enough for a person to have a life’s work; to be able to see the validation of that work firsthand is understandably an overpowering experience. Linde might not call those years of waiting “faith,” but what he describes sounds somewhat like it—the persevering hope in the face of doubt and self-questioning: “What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful?” Faith, after all, is not just a religious category, and science isn’t divorced from our human capacities for aesthetic appreciation and awe.

“So this is really helpful,” Linde continues, and you get the impression that he’s not talking about the discovery’s impact on science, but about himself. “It’s really, really helpful.”